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The United Nations published a horrifying report detailing the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian children by the Israeli military. The numbers are shocking and the stories are a nightmare. You’ve been warned.
The report estimates that at least 20,000 children have been killed and 44,000 wounded between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2025. This accounts for 30% of the Palestinian casualties, and the rate may be higher because of the estimated 5,160 children that are still “buried under the rubble.”
The children that were wounded are often wounded for life and will require medical care that is not available in Gaza. The report says that they have suffered from what is medically known as “polytrauma,” or “multiple traumas impacting multiple body parts at once, such as bone fractures, significant soft tissue damage, brain and spine injuries, nerve and organ damage and perforating wounds.”
Doctors reported what they described as “clustering” of injuries, with children arriving on different days with similar wounds to specific body parts. One physician cited in the UN report said the pattern led him to conclude that some children appeared to have been deliberately targeted.
This is consistent with reporting by the BBC last year.
“Based on the clustering of injuries and the targeted body parts, I assess that the Israeli soldiers have been deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice – a different body part being targeted on different days… There is a very clear pattern that suggest this is a deliberate aiming of different body parts [of children],” says a doctor who visited Gaza on medical mission.
Other children are at risk for injury because at least 10 percent of the explosives sent into Gaza have not detonated.
When the United Nations asked Israel why it was in violation of the United Nations law to ensure children “all the rights of human beings, as well as rights held by them alone as children, including under article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),10 which entitles them to special care, assistance and social protection, and under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC),” Israel “maintained its longstanding position that it does not have legal responsibility under the CRC for Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza.”
Israel has signed and ratified the CRC, they are just choosing not to honor it. And the rest of us are watching our governments choose to do nothing about it.